Chapter Text
Jung Hoseok squints against the flashing of the lights rotating blindingly on top of the police cars in the quiet upscale neighborhood. Well, previously quiet. Some alarm had been triggered and someone had screamed and now there was a double homicide he was rolling onto the scene of and there wasn't enough coffee in the world for him to not be missing his bed, lead detective or no. His partner lets out a large, un-stifled yawn from the passenger seat and Hoseok glares at him.
"The alarm was tripped at 2:47 a.m. right hyung?" Hoseok's partner drawls as he tries to hide another yawn.
"That's right," Hoseok replies, trying not to snap. He glances at the clock in the dashboard of the cruiser and cries a little on the inside.
"It's 3:45 now and I woke up like, twenty minutes ago, but I'm pretty sure you haven't been home since yesterday morning." Big round doe-eyes look over the rim of a pair of over-sized glasses at him and Hoseok feels his ire at the younger deputy thaw.
"It’s alright, I don't sleep, Jeon." Hoseok replies before taking a long draw of his coffee cup, as if to drive his point home. "Forgot to put in contacts?" He gestures at the glasses which his partner pushes back up his nose.
"I had no time-" The tap of a flashlight against the window jolts them both and Hoseok hisses as his coffee splashes, burning his thumb. He sucks the burnt digit as he rolls down the window and fixes the forensic investigator with his most intimidating glare.
"We got the photos. It's all ready for you to come in, detectives." The member of the forensic teams says shakily. Hoseok grunts an affirmation and rolls his window back up.
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"It's nice to have someone I don't have to speak English with," Jimin says, rolling his lips between his teeth as he watches his lunch date stab his chicken with a fork.
"You've been here a long time then?" The other man asks. Jimin leans forward, the low rasp of the other man's voice is such a welcome sound he feels like he's thrumming.
"Yoongi-ssi I've been here for too long. I miss Korean food. Real Korean food, tteokbokki and japchae and gimbap. The flavors that don't exist here." The man named Yoongi nods sympathetically.
"Fried chicken isn't the same. They call it fried chicken here, but that's such a lie. Also, you can call me hyung. I'm older than you."
"Alright! Yoongi-hyung then! Anyway, I've been stationed in the London offices for almost two years now. I go home as often as I can, but it just isn’t the same!" Jimin whines and watches Yoongi who is very carefully chewing the chicken curry he just took a bite of. The smell of spices waft around them. They're nestled in a corner of the MI6 agency cafeteria and six inch thick glass stretches from floor to ceiling offering a decent view of the river Thames despite the foggy London afternoon.
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The man sitting across the table is unreasonably handsome in his crisp white suit with his glossy black hair styled up off his face. His posture and poise indicate that he's not overly concerned about being in front of the three leaders of the New York Dragon Triads by himself and if anything, he seems bored. The three Dragons sitting at the table all subtly shift themselves away from the broad shouldered man when he exhales sharply through his nose.
"Here's the thing," He starts his eyes sparkling as they snap into focus, almost as if he suddenly realized he had company. "You're gathering cargo that I can't let you move. You understand right? I run the peninsula and your shit doesn't fly here."
"You don't run shit, Hades." The black clad Dragon leader snaps. His day jacket is rumpled at the hem where he'd been worrying at it.
"Actually, I do. I run a lot of shit. I knew the second your feet hit Korean soil, Cheng. I've known every move you've made since you got here. When I say your cargo can't move, I mean your cargo will not fucking move." He punctuates each syllable as if explaining something complicated to a toddler.
The three Dragons rocket to their feet at that, panic wide in their eyes. "You're full of shit. No one has that kind of pull.” The black dragon snaps.
“We've been working with the Snakeheads in Busan for months. We've already got the merchandise moved out on a freighter." The green dragon yells, but his voice waivers.
"You think you own Korea, but you're on borrowed time, Hades." The Dragon in a satin blue track jacket shouts as he pulls a gun out of his waistband.
"Wei, you've broken protocol." Hades says with a tsk, his face a mask of calm as a gunshot rings out in the closed room. Two dragons are left standing and the blue dragon slumps to the floor. The man in the white suit stands up and sets his handgun down on the table as he closes the distance between himself and the remaining two dragons in two long strides. "If you think for one goddamn second I'm letting you move any of your "cargo" you really don't understand who you’re dealing with."
"B-but our freighter," The green dragon tries again. The armpits of his hoodie are starting to stain with sweat.
"Being raided by the police as we speak. You can't win here, Cong. Do you really want to keep trying to scare me? I'm the fucking King of Hell!" The man called Hades shouts in the green dragon's face, his fair features twisted up in fury. He raises his hand up to strike Cong, but pauses and lets out a breath. "If you ever come back here to try and push your garbage drugs or move cargo you're dead. If you think I'm lying, you're dead. You underestimate me, you're dead." Hades sneers and backs away a fraction. The two Dragons take the opportunity to regroup themselves closer to the only door in the room. The confined area smells like blood and gunpowder. Hades looks to the Dragons then the door.
"What about Wei?" Cheng manages to ask, eyeing the body of the blue dragon, unmoved from where it had fallen to the floor.
"Give me two coins." Hades says, a small smirk playing at his plush lips. The other two fumble, fear and shock jerking them into an odd obedience. Two coins are handed over and he kneels and places them over the eyes of the Blue Dragon. "Tell Wei's crew that he's paid the ferryman and he belongs to the King of Hell now."
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The plate on the door read "Cyber Crimes Division Head" in English and under it in big blocky Romanized letters "Kim Namjoon". A tall man, Kim Namjoon himself, stands in front of the door with his hand resting on the door handle. He tries giving it another turn, but it refuses to budge. Namjoon lets his head thump delicately against the thick door. His second day in the position and he'd locked himself out of his office after lunch. He already felt like an imposter, but apparently the building felt he was too. A grumble bubbled up from his throat and turned into a silent scream behind his tightly shut lips.
"Two steps to the left, Director Kim." Someone orders from behind him. Namjoon obliges and shuffles to the left. There's a click and a shuffle as the door unlocks and is pushed open. "I've got a spare key."
Namjoon turns around and smiles sheepishly down at his assistant in gratitude. She's tiny but she is a firecracker and Namjoon is increasingly grateful for her. "Thank you. Hopefully you won't have to use it too often, Dahyun-ssi."
"We'll see." Dahyun says with a smile and walks away, heading to her desk. Namjoon fights the urge to scream again. Even his assistant knows he's a fuck-up and she’s only been his assistant for a day and a half.
Namjoon carefully shuts the door behind him and sighs. He'd been promoted to this position from senior investigator of Cyber Crime for the National Intelligence Service and he had the honor of being the youngest Director in the organization, not that he felt any better about it with all those accolades and expectations following him around.
"Alright, Namjoon, you stupid bear. You got this job, time to show them you deserve it." He says to himself as he slides into his chair and flicks open his laptop. "Let's see what Tartarus has been up to." The laptop blinks on a blank screen and Namjoon enters a string of commands that brings a search page up in a shell of a browser window. His work computer sits untouched on his desk. His cell phone lights up with an overly complicated encryption key and he tries to memorize it before his phone wipes it. It takes him another two minutes, but he's through the backdoors and plugged into the underbelly of the internet.
Namjoon likes to envision this part of the internet as a real marketplace with store fronts and stalls and people wearing masks as they try to trade tiger bones for cocaine. Really it's just a very secure piece of the internet that took a very long time to find. The last two years of his career he had spent developing an algorithm that would trace keywords and websites involved in what the government loosely defined as Cyber Crime, but really had to do with the online movements of the criminal organizations in east Asia and the world. Now he uses the backdoor in his own program to stream the keywords he wants directly to his laptop screen.
Namjoon thinks to himself that maybe if he can take out Tartarus, one of the biggest organized crime syndicates in South Korea, maybe he won't feel like such an imposter. He hums to himself with that thought and the word 'Tartarus' pops up on his screen. He clicks on the link which takes him to a forum well known to be used by Triad affiliates in North America. The forums are buzzing with news that the leader of the Blue Dragon gang had been taken out by the leader of Tartarus. Namjoon swears softly as he reads snippets about the shift in power, and the loss of an unknown product only referred to as “the cargo”.
It doesn’t take a genius to decipher the kind of cargo that Tartarus would take from another gang and it makes Namjoon’s blood boil that living, breathing people can be moved like cattle so easily under the government’s nose
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Kim may be a common surname, but Taehyung’s family can trace their lineage back to royalty and he has made it his personal goal in life to make sure that he uses it as an excuse to get his way far more times than a grown man should.
He wears it like a suit of armor against his university classmates, the sons and daughters of CEO’s and celebrities, diplomats and bureaucrats. He’s the son of a senator himself, which is why he’s currently sipping at a MaiTai at nine in the morning while the daughter of the American ambassador sucks his cock. He’s not overly into it, if he’s honest with himself, but she was pretty and he was bored and drunk so he lets it run its course. She gags as he comes in the back of her throat and she slithers up from between his legs. Taehyung is sure that having a pretty girl with big blue eyes and jizz dribbling down her chin as she tries to kiss you before breakfast is the *dream* of most men. He dodges her kiss and stands up, chugging his MaiTai as he goes.
“That was nice, but don’t put your mouth anywhere else on me.” He says as he tucks his polo shirt into the waistband of his khakis.
“You don’t have to say it like that, Oppar.” She mewls in accented Korean, her plump lips glossy and pouted out. She really is pretty, Taehyung thinks as the boat sways slightly and she’s pitched towards the floor and any thought he had been entertaining about inviting her back into his bed later in the day falls to the floor with her.
“Sea’s getting choppy. Get a jacket if you’re going above deck.” He turns and heads out of the cabin and up into the sunlight. The yacht is his absolute favorite perk of being young, handsome and rich. The captain shouts a greeting from the helm and Taehyung waves him off in favor of turning his face to the sun and sea spray.
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